There are many success stories about the public cloud, but concerns about security, portability, reliability and access to systems remain.

Focusing on Bread-and-Butter Issues

Larry Bonfante would agree heartily. Two years ago, the CIO
of the United States Tennis Association (USTA) moved the nonprofit
organization's back-end systems—including its financial reporting and
departmental systems—from a shared data center into Amazon Web Services'
Elastic Compute Cloud, cutting related operational costs by 70 percent and
condensing the time needed to provision a new server from a week to just an
hour.

Perhaps even more important, Amazon has helped the sport’s nonprofit
governing body contend with what Bonfante calls "the equivalent of 14
consecutive Black Fridays" when it runs the prestigious US Open tennis
tournament at its Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing, N.Y., for
two weeks every September. During that time, a sleepy facility with a 30-person
staff transforms into a teeming mass of 20,000 credentialed players, coaches, concessionaires,
staff, media and the like, and Bonfante didn’t want to continue committing the infrastructure
resources required to support the resulting burst in demand on the USTA's systems.

"It's hard to keep a cadre of experts on board the way
Amazon does," he says. "Our bread and butter is tennis, not building
an infrastructure."

Despite the USTA's successes in the cloud, Bonfante still
wrestles with a couple of challenges. For instance, compliance-related concerns
have thus far prevented him from placing consumer-facing systems in the cloud.

Because 80 percent of the USTA's ticket sales are processed
online, they must conform to the PCI security standards governing credit card
transactions. And any medical information pertaining to players or fans whose
health issues arise at tournaments must meet the guidelines of the Health
Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Bonfante is not confident that
cloud providers can ensure across-the-board compliance, but he's on the lookout
for any opportunities to bridge that gap.

Meanwhile, on the reliability front, Bonfante says "I’m not holding my breath" waiting
for Amazon and other cloud providers to start compensating customers for lost
revenue when cloud infrastructures suffer inevitable hiccups, such as the
hours-long outage Amazon customers experienced in April 2011. Instead, he
accepts the modest rebate Amazon is contractually obligated to pay and chalks
up the remaining loss as an unavoidable risk of operating in the public cloud
today.